There is an app for that? The impact of community knowledge workers in Uganda

ABSTRACT

Rapidly expanding mobile network coverage in developing countries offers new ways to reach poor farmers in isolated places. This article explores the potential for Information and Communication Technology to provide agricultural information and extension services to smallholder farmers, and links this to empirical insights of an intervention in Uganda, where community knowledge workers rely on mobile devices to deliver context- and time-sensitive data to farmers. Consistent with theoretical insights related to information inefficiencies, we find that the intervention leads farmers to move away from low-risk low-return crops toward more commercially oriented commodities. Our analysis also suggests that, for the case of maize, the intervention causes farmers to sell less on the market, but at significantly higher prices.

KEYWORDS:

• Agricultural extension
• market information
• Uganda
• mobile applications

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Bjorn Van Campenhout is a Research Fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute based in the Kampala office in Uganda. His research focuses on smallholders farmer interaction with both input and output markets and how this affects production, revenues and ultimately wellbeing. He obtained his PhD from the KULeuven in Belgium [email: [email protected]].

Notes

1. An extreme example would be where the market for the primary staple food is missing, such that the farm household has no other option than produce for auto-consumption. However, in other setups, where for example there are labor market and/or land market constraints, the optimal production decisions may be conditional on consumption decisions.

2. An online technical appendix explains how we deal with the fact that the UNHS data refer to the 2005/2006 agricultural season, while the baseline data from the CKW areas refer to the 2009/2010 agricultural season.

3. We also control for region in all specifications.